While traveling through the Cleveland Metroparks Euclid Creek Reservation,
one can experience the beauty of nature and imposing shale cliffs.
Some of these cliffs contained a type of sandstone called Euclid Bluestone. A plethora of quarries
sprung up including a fittingly named village called Bluestone. Eventually an obscure shortline
railroad began to transport this quarried rock to the Nickel Plate Road in Euclid, Ohio.
Today it is hard to imagine where exactly the quarries, town and Euclid Railroad once were.
In this video we’ll explore the history and remnants of all three that are left today.
Euclid and South Euclid, Ohio are inner-ring suburbs located about 10 miles east of downtown
Cleveland. Running north through both cities is part of the 43-mile-long Euclid Creek watershed
which empties into Lake Erie. When Bluestone was discovered along the creek near South Green
Road and Monticello Boulevard, a handful of small stone quarries were established in 1840.
However, these first quarries seldom worked and were eventually abandoned.
In 1867 Duncan McFarland, an Irish Immigrant that settled in South Euclid,
opened a quarry on the east bank of Euclid Creek near the previous abandoned quarries.
McFarland’s sons James and Thomas followed in their father’s footsteps by opening
another quarry on the west bank of the creek in 1871.
News about the profitability of quarrying in Euclid Creek must have spread quickly,
as that same year the Forest City Stone Co. opened a quarry near the McFarlands on the east bank of
the creek. In 1875, the McFarland’s decided to sell their quarries to the Forest City Stone Co.
In 1872, business partners Levi Malone, William McBride and Robert Maxwell opened
a quarry west of Euclid Creek along the east bank of Nine-Mile Creek. This is
today the location of Quarry Park North by South Belvoir and Monticello Boulevards.
Malone’s quarry was also successful as the ones by Euclid Creek.
Bluestone received its name from the blueish gray color it has. The process of quarrying
bluestone was accomplished through the use of steam powered saws and manual labor.
Vertical cuts were first made in the stone and then split apart horizontally. Quarrymen
then drilled lines of holes and hammered wedges into it. Commercial quarrying of Bluestone was
used in the production of numerous products like foundation blocks, windows sills and sidewalks.
Around 1882, Levi Malone found himself in a predicament.
The City of Chicago had awarded a contract to his company to supply stone to make sidewalks for the
new Chicago Board of Trade Building. Malone and his partners realized that transporting
the stone by wagon to the New York Chicago & St. Louis Railroad (known as Nickel Plate
Road for short) was not feasible to meet the jobs completion date in 1885.
Then an idea hit them, what if they were to build a railroad to the Nickel Plate?
And that’s just what they did, a company called the Euclid Railroad was incorporated on October
11, 1883. Between 1883 and 1884 1.451 miles of track was built partly by forces from
the Malone and Company and the Nickel Plate Road. The line left the Nickel Plate mainline in Euclid
where it then crossed Euclid Ave. into Green Creek ravine near where Upper Valley Drive is.
During construction, the laborers made a cut for the right of way on the west bank of the ravine.
It used this ravine as a natural uphill rampway to reach the quarries in South Euclid.
What’s interesting about the Euclid Railroad is it owned no locomotives or rolling stock.
When a shipment needed to be picked up, the Nickel Plate would provide
a locomotive pulling two to three cars at a time.
The quarries flourished because of the Euclid Railroad and employed
hundreds of immigrants mainly from European countries like Italy, Ireland, and Sweden.
These quarrymen eventually established a small settlement called Bluestone near the five quarries
and became a boomtown in the 1890’s. It had a post office that was established in 1884, two
stores and saloons, a church and temperance hall. The tiny hamlet was located along a road that
connected between the quarries. This road today is called Bluestone, which honors the ghost town.
For over 30 years the Euclid Railroad hauled this quarried Bluestone downhill to the Nickel
Plate Road. It was recorded in 1892 that Malone’s quarries output a yearly production of 250,000
cubic feet of bluestone. In 1897, the Malone and Company sold the railroad to the Cleveland
Stone Company. Quarrying in South Euclid reached its peak by the 1890’s and it began slowing in
the early 1900’s due to the increasing demand of concrete. The Euclid Railroad was then sold again
in 1919 to a private individual and by the end of the 1920’s, quarrying in South Euclid ceased.
The quarries in Euclid Creek largely remained intact until the 1930’s.
During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps
as a part of his New Deal program. The CCC was a work relief program
that provided work for unemployed unmarried men by developing land owned by federal,
state, and local governments. In 1917 the Cleveland Metroparks was formed and acquired
portions of Euclid Creek for their park system. CCC workers were tasked with building bridges,
walls, miles of trails and filling in the quarries.
The railroad which owed its existence to the quarries, had now lost
its main customer. Luckily however, numerous industries that had been established northeast
of Monticello Blvd and South Green Road helped supplement the loss of the quarries. In
September 1928 the Euclid Railroad had to shift part of their line on the west side of
Green Road to the east. There were multiple deciding factors behind this
decision. The first being that one of the spurs led to the depleted quarries
along Nine-Mile Creek, which no longer had any freight movements over it. The second
reason was the most pressing issue. Land surrounding the line after it crossed Green
Road was recently annexed to the City of Cleveland Heights. A company called the Green Road Realty
Association was planning to build housing subdivisions by this area of the railroad.
Instead of building around the line, the Realty Association helped the
Euclid Railroad pay for the relocation and removal of two grade crossings.
This reduced the line's trackage by about 3,859 feet and as a result
substantially cut back the Euclid Railroad’s track maintenance costs.
Once the relocation was completed in 1929 the railroad largely went into obscurity
until 1942 when Michael Fornaro and Lee Lehman purchased the railroad.
The two partners formed the South Euclid Concrete Company in 1945 and reinvigorated the railroad by
making connections with other new industries by their concrete plant on South Green Road.
Fornaro and Lehman’s bookkeeper, John McCarthy, became General Manager of the Euclid railroad
and would walk up and down the tracks twice a week searching for new customers.
Their plan worked as by 1950 the Euclid Railroad served 18 customers at the Green Road terminal
and had 1.8 miles of track. Instead of just hauling bluestone, the railroad instead carried
numerous commodities like cement, lumber, cinders, peat moss, slag, salt and coal.
In 1962 the Euclid Railroad began losing money and by 1966 the Norfolk & Western
Railway (successor of the Nickel Plate Road), refused to move anymore freight until a serious
rehabilitation of the line could be made. Since the Euclid Railroad was consistently losing money
and estimated repairs would have cost $23,600, an application for abandonment was instead submitted
to the Interstate Commerce Commission. The abandonment was granted on March 29, 1967.
The question now you may ask is are there any remnants left of the Euclid Railroad? Let’s take
a look at what I was able to find. We’ll first start off at the north end of the Euclid Railroad
where it connected with the Nickel Plate mainline at milepost 145.7. In this ground view we are
looking west towards the connection which would have been off to the left. A short distance south
of the railroad’s connection with the Nickel Plate is a small industrial park. The Euclid Railroad’s
right of way ran south alongside these buildings on where the grassy area is towards Euclid Avenue.
It then crossed over Euclid Avenue and went into the heavily forested Green Greek Ravine.
The City of Euclid owns some of the right of way through the ravine and I was fortunate
enough to get permission to walk it. While the tracks were ripped up in the 1970’s,
the land that was used for the right of way is still here slowly being reclaimed by nature.
You can see why only one locomotive pulling two to three freight cars traversed the line at a time.
It was treacherous navigating through the ravine around mostly unbanked curves.
There are multiple washouts and land eroding away today as a result. Scattered along the right of
way are railroad ties, tie plates, spikes, and even a few warped rails lying in the creek.
After coming out of the woods, the Euclid Railroad
crossed Glenridge Road into their Green Road terminal that served a number of industries.
The tracks on Glenridge were paved over, but a piece of rail sticking out of the pavement
is still visible. Before the line was relocated east of Green Road, the Euclid
Railroad used to cross over Monticello Blvd. into the quarries by Euclid Creek. Today part
of this right of way is used as an access road to the Euclid Creek Reservation’s Ranger Office.
For the most part, evidence of the Euclid Railroad is long gone. The City of Euclid has proposed
to turn the right of way they own into a walking trail and park honoring the railroad and quarries.
However, residents surrounding the land were not supportive.